Fearing Ghosts Of Old Tavern
by Ryan Richardson
A team of ghost hunters investigate an old tavern in Wareham, Massachusetts.
It was easy enough to miss if you weren’t paying attention: a little flicker of light traveling in front of a camera.
While most people would shrug and dismiss it, a team of paranormal investigators saw it as a sign of life – well, life after death – at the Fearing Tavern.
Image: The team of paranormal investigators from WBSM’s Spooky Southcoast
The researchers, hosts of WBSM’s Spooky Southcoast, approached the Wareham Historical Society about investigating the haunted happenings at the historic building seven months ago, and they were very quickly given the green light from Historical Society President Carolyn McMorrow, who was intrigued about the possibility of ghosts, goblins and finding a new way to get people excited about the town’s history.
Tim Weisberg, the show’s host and investigation leader, has always been interested in the paranormal; to look at it practically in his own back yard was a great opportunity for the Historical Society and paranormal research.
“This is a science we’re trying to get recognized,” he said.
Once they had permission, the crew began their research.
They didn’t start in some remote graveyard communing with the dead, or just going into the tavern with camera lights flashing and recording equipment on. The investigation started at the library, with histories of Wareham and the Fearing Tavern.
“It’s paranormal research, and lot of people forget the latter part,” Weisberg said.
After weeks of reading and looking through documents, the team was ready to look around the tavern during a pre-investigation. Apart from getting familiar with where things were in the building, like electrical outlets to plug in cameras and microphones, they also learned about places where they might wind up tripping in the dark.
The actual investigation took place over the course of six hours. The team went in with cameras and rigged up an array of microphones to capture evidence of spectral activity.
They presented what their investigation revealed to a packed audience at the monthly meeting of the Wareham Historical Society this past Monday.
The investigators noted there were many different types of evidence in addition to the more profound experiences that some of them had felt, such as being thrown back or pushed, during their years of investigation. The two most common were photographic and audio evidence.
Carlston Wood, one of the investigators, spoke about the two major types of photographic evidence apart from mysterious looming figures and strange shadows.
Orbs are opaque balls of light that appear in photographs from time to time. Investigators say that sometimes these orbs are spirits drawing on energy from the camera to make themselves visible, but they also admit that often orbs come from “backscatter.” Backscatter is where light from the camera or other sources is reflected off a nearby object and into the camera, which then creates round spots of light where the picture is overexposed.
Orbs that aren’t obviously the product of lens flare and other easily explained phenomena have been attributed to spirits, ghosts, angels and energy beings.
Another group of mysterious artifacts are rods, which are found more frequently in video recordings.
Like orbs, the name neatly summarizes how the object appears on film. Rods have only recently become a prominent paranormal phenomenon, and theories abound on their origin. Researchers with different interests have claimed that they are unknown and bizarre creatures, aliens, ghosts and demons.
Rods may also be motion blur caused by fast-moving insects or birds. The series Monster Quest on the History Channel showed footage of a rod that was revealed to be a common moth when they showed a high-speed version of the film.
Team member Mike Markowicz, who serves as the group’s audio expert, presented the audio evidence known as electronic voice phenomena, or EVP, to the audience.
Markowicz became interested in the paranormal after a friend introduced him to an audio recording of two women walking in a museum and talking that was suddenly interrupted by a scream that neither of them heard. The distinct scream got him interested in making his own recordings, asking questions of spirits to prompt conversation.
While many people looking for EVP wade through hours of tape and go days looking for things, Markowicz felt lucky. “That wasn’t my case at all,” he said.
At the Fearing Tavern, he pulled out 48 clips of differing quality from the background noise the group recorded over a series of microphones. Markowicz says that for each hour of recording he does, there’s about four hours of listening for anomalies over and over, and then enhancing them on the computer to the point where they’re intelligible.
Even then it’s a little like trying to figure out what exactly the Kingsmen were saying during their recording of “Louie Louie.” The investigators noted that not everyone would hear the words, or even hear the same words when they dropped out some of the extra noise and turned up the volume.
“There’s a lot you can do with a computer to get the data out,” Markowicz said.
He introduced each recording, talking about what was going on at the time and what he thought the voice was saying. Some of the messages that they played were friendly, but others, including hints of a murder, were a little more sinister.
The gold standard of evidence was video.
“I can show you a picture of a weird light, but we could have faked that,” Weisberg said.
Video shows what’s going on in the room at the time of the activity, as well as how people react to it. Weisberg talked about the different methods for filming, which includes thermal imaging and infrared settings, on some cameras that lit up the room with invisible light that the camera could detect.
The investigators shared a short clip filmed in an infrared mode of a set of shelves covered in dolls. A spot of light traveled horizontally and slowly across the frame. The investigators said they didn’t have any infrared light sources on hand to cause the spot, apart from the one already present on the camera.
Each of the investigators has had a profound fascination with the supernatural for most of their lives, whether they were touched by an experience early in life or simply curious about a hidden world just beyond our perception.
Weisberg said they try and stay as grounded as possible by taking a scientific approach to their work. Matt Moniz, an analytical chemist by day and paranormal investigator by night, provides some of the methodical muscle as a scientist who also has 20 years of experience investigating the paranormal.
“Science is really 99 percent attitude and 1 percent application,” he said.
That attitude entails remaining objective about the information they find during their investigations and being skeptical without becoming a skeptic. Moniz said that skeptics have already made up their minds about the presence of the paranormal so they don’t bother to weigh the evidence.
Closed-mindedness is one attack frequently leveled at the critics of paranormal research, but it can just as easily be turned around.
The variety of alternative explanations – aliens, government conspiracies, energy beings and nature spirits – for many of these mysteries, as well as the subjectivity of the evidence, makes it hard to determine why one supernatural explanation is more plausible than another, or even that supernatural explanations are necessary at all.
The group’s most skeptical member, Matt Costa, asks those questions.
“We all try to give a different perspective,” he said.
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